


Near Enough

by explosionshark



Category: Scream (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-19
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-08-09 17:42:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7811206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/explosionshark/pseuds/explosionshark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Would you really have killed him?” Emma asks, and the guilt kicks in a half second later.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>The same questions keep gnawing at Emma.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Near Enough

**Author's Note:**

> Un-beta'd. I was asking for Scream prompts and I received a bunch that wanted Emma and Audrey sleeping together in the aftermath of s2. This went in a direction no one asked for, but I have No Regrets.
> 
> Title from the Safe To Say song.

“Would you really have killed him?” Emma asks, and the guilt kicks in a half second later. It feels like cheating, asking outright. Audrey wouldn’t lie to her, not now, not about this, not after everything. It’s feels like taking advantage, somehow, but she can’t call the words back into her mouth. She breathes in, waits for the answer.

Audrey shifts next to her, tense beneath the sheets. The silence swells up between them, heavy, claustrophobic, pressing Emma’s shoulders flat against the mattress.

“Yes,” Audrey admits, voice low but steady. She clears her throat a little and Emma waits for her to continue, to elaborate, but she doesn’t.

“Yes,” Emma repeats, rolling the answer around in her mouth, trying to decide how it tastes. It sits on her tongue like a stone, foreign, heavy, out of place. It’s an answer and it’s honest, but the itch in her brain that made her ask in the first place hasn’t been scratched, so Emma tries again. “Do you wish that we had?”

The silence is shorter this time. Audrey’s hand finds hers beneath the blanket, fingers skittering anxiously across the backs of Emma’s knuckles and then dancing away, just outside the edge of contact.

“I’m glad that you didn’t,” Audrey says. It’s not an answer to Emma’s question and they both know it.

Emma exhales, slow.

She can press now, she knows. She could roll over, dig the heels of her palms into the sharp planes of Audrey’s collar bones, and press for the truth, the whole truth. She could sink her fingers into Audrey’s skin and ask her to peel back and back and back the layers of herself until the truth, bloody and ugly and irrevocable, spills out into the space between them.

She could ask and Audrey would do it, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how little she wanted to.

Audrey would do anything for her.

She only has to ask.

But she doesn’t, because it wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be kind. Because the truth is there in the words Audrey keeps tucked under her tongue. Because it wouldn’t change anything.

Emma slides her palm across the mattress ‘til the side of her hand bumps against Audrey’s. She twines their fingers together and tugs until Audrey rolls onto her side, closes the gap between them. Emma breathes slow and deep and as even as she can when Audrey settles her cheek against Emma’s shoulder. She tips her head down, nose tickling where it brushes Audrey’s hair, and touches her lips to the edge of Audrey’s hairline.

“Does it scare you?” Audrey’s voice is faint, almost lost in the haze of sleep.

_ Do I scare you? _ she means.

It’s been a month since they put Kieran away and the anxiety, the nightmares, the flashbacks are as bad as ever. Her mother had asked, very gently, if Emma wanted to return to the hospital, just for a bit, until she felt safe again. But the thought of going back is suffocating. Intolerable even without the fact that she’d be separated from Audrey again.

She’s seeing a new doctor, one two hours away, in Lake Charles. He’s supposed to be one of the best in the state, at least that’s what Ms. Lang had said. They have sessions three times a week. Most of his other patients are army vets.

She can’t eat grape jelly now, because that had been Kieran’s favorite. She can still remember what it tasted like, smeared on the corner of his mouth at breakfast. She hates the smell of leather. She checks every lock in the house three times before she can go to sleep and even then it’s a struggle not to get out of bed in the night to check and check again. For two weeks she kept her phone turned off and locked in a drawer in the kitchen, she still feels sick when she hears it ring.

Pretty much every damn thing scares her now, in some way.

But not this. Not Audrey.

Never Audrey.

“No,” she whispers, pressing the words into the center of Audrey’s forehead with the brush of her lips. “No, no.”   


It’s the truth. The whole truth.

Bloody.

Irrevocable.

Audrey tucks her head into the crook of Emma’s neck, hot air rushing across Emma’s bare throat when she sighs into Emma’s skin.

Emma doesn’t flinch.

**Author's Note:**

> still theoretically accepting prompts at [my tumblr](http://explosionshark.tumblr.com/)


End file.
